Like so many others, my career trajectory hasn’t exactly been linear. If I were to draw a roadmap of my route to where I am today, it would be full of twists, turns and dead ends. I’ve had so many different roles in different functions, the “skills” section on my LinkedIn looked like someone put up a bunch of fun phrases on the wall and threw darts in the dark to pick which ones made the list..
While it’s been a whole lot of fun, and having diverse experiences is a great asset in many scenarios, it seldom looks super exciting to a higher-level employer who’s looking for depth not breadth. As I looked to level up my career, I found myself browsing job posting after job posting, and getting interviews but never the job. I realized that while I had the skills, the experience, and the work-product, I needed to package them up and tie a bow for the next hiring manager.
I’ll be honest, after so many diverse experiences, trying to choose one particular skillset to present as a selling point to a potential employer was pretty difficult and demoralizing. To add to the angst, because I hadn’t been focusing on one skillset, I didn’t have a portfolio of examples to share - #ouch! But after a little reflection and analysis, I realized I didn’t have to choose. My secret marcomm superpowers were hidden just behind the seemingly inconsequential/disconnected experiences I’d had up until that moment.
My Origin Story - and how I used it to create a dream portfolio
We’ve all seen the superhero stories, where Jane Doe turns into Jane WHOA, and our professional journeys are nothing short of an origin story in the making. After working in and around the #marcomms professional life for a few years, I realized I’d been training for a full-time creative career all along…I just needed to prove it.
If you’re in the same place I was and feeling overwhelmed at the idea of building a portfolio that proves you’re ready for the next step in your career, I think it’s safe to say that you’re also probably sitting on a goldmine of marketable skills that you don’t even realize you’ve acquired. Here, I’m going to share my story of how I took the time, energy, and effort I’d already invested in my career and turned it into a power-packed media portfolio that helped me land my dream job.
1. Making messages relevant to various audiences.
Given my current career as a communicator, it’ll come as little surprise that I have a knack for writing and making jargon digestible. Proofreading is practically my hobby at this point, and it’s something I routinely do in my spare time as a non-profit volunteer. I have a particular passion for making sure the recipient understands what I’m trying to communicate.
This proved particularly valuable to one of my first employers, a minority youth education non-profit organization, and I quickly became their go-to person for “first and last looks” on grant reports, internal and external emails, and more.
As that organization’s marketing campaigns and communications increased, I created and collected example after example of instances I had taken a canned message and made it understandable to parents, participants,, board members, employees, funders, and the general public. Making a message make sense to everyone receiving it is not always intuitive to everyone, and having multiple documents that demonstrated my ability to identify the core message and communicate it to different audiences did wonders for my portfolio and resume.
2. Building strategy out of chaos
Back to my early days at that same non-profit: my first day on the job, I went in expecting well-established standard operating procedures, guidelines, playbooks, and best practices. I thought there would be rules of engagement documented, and all I would have to do was work within the framework. Boy, was I wrong 😖
The reality of non-profit is that everyone’s doing their best with what they’ve got, and are often so busy there isn’t time to pause, reflect, and package best practices or recommendations.
As I settled into my position, I recognized the need for standard operating procedures and brand guidelines, and got to work establishing easy-to-follow step-by-step guidelines for my inevitable successor to follow. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was actually building a brand strategy from the ground up!
First, I tackled social media. Given how cost-effective and necessary it is for marketing, it seemed like the most impactful resource to have on hand. Without any real experience building a social media policy or style guide, I Googled “social media guideline templates,” found a worksheet that looked like it would suit my needs, and got to work populating the fields.
The exercise took the better part of a week, but in the end I had a professional package that included a database with links to all coordinated social media accounts, a collection of graphics templates in recommended sizes, where and how to find useful metrics and analytics, and best practices for each platform, including recommended word counts, target audiences, examples of what to do and what not to do, and so much more.
I was pretty proud of the overall package, and the research I’d done to build it proved invaluable in my time there. Because I had used competitors’ best posts as examples in my best practice documents, I was intimately aware from the start of how competitors were advertising - and what we could do to emulate and improve on their tactics. Not only was this the first step towards a consistent online presence for my organization, I had created my first social media strategy and policy - another piece to add to my portfolio.
Once my social media strategy was approved and I had a win under my belt, I moved on to brand guidelines, additional marketing and communications best practices, and codifying standard operating procedures. I did all of this out of necessity, but I walked away with the realization that I was capable of building impactful frameworks that boosted my portfolio in incredible ways. The strategies I built in this position demonstrated my resourcefulness in finding the information I needed, commitment to best practices, and ability to bring structure to an unorganized process. When I sought to advance in my career, it was clear proof that I had the ability to think strategically, as well as practically.
3. Recycling, Repackaging, Reusing: AKA, building and working within your budget
Professionally, seeing a database packed with underutilized assets crushes me. The unmet potential of those materials is soul-shattering, and it’s my personal mission to make the most of what I’ve got, whether I have a low or high budget. My quest to reuse what I can get my hands on has led to a love for integrated marketing campaigns and cost-savings over time. As an added benefit, since I have a proven history of recycling what I’ve got in as many ways as possible, I’m rarely told no when I DO ask for funds for something new.
In another success story arising from the same chaotic systems that forced me to learn strategy, while I was researching our brand guidelines (or lack thereof), I found literally thousands of pictures and videos that had been taken over the years but were hiding in various unrelated and disorganized folders. When I unveiled my discovery, the president of the organization stared at me in dismay and said, “I’ve always been told we don’t have pictures and need to hire a photographer.” #jackpot 🎰
I distributed the images among our designers, and hyperlinked to them in all of my outgoing press releases for the media. The adoption for both was high, leading to even greater brand consistency in both owned and earned media. Those pictures later appeared in a capital campaign, social media, news segments, websites, multiple annual reports, and on pop-up banners, flyers, and more.
I also started a new YouTube account for the organization, and got to work posting the videos I’d found. I also posted those videos to great success on our other social platforms as sponsored content, and distributed them to local schools and religious organizations as a commercial for participant recruitment.
My personal mission to recycle and repurpose the content I’d found ended up saving my organization significant time, energy, effort, and (of course) money. Before taking the time to reflect on this experience, I might not have said I had expertise in integrated marketing, but by finding multiple ways to reuse and repackage existing brand assets, I created consistency and made the most of a previous investment my boss didn’t even know about! I was able to add new integrated marketing campaigns to my portfolio, and demonstrate my effectiveness in stretching a budget and turning trash into treasure.
The Takeaway
When you’re looking for opportunities to take the next step in your career, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed or even inadequate. After a few painful rejections, I absolutely did - but after a little reflection I realized that I actually had so much going for me, I just didn’t know how to tell my story effectively.
The truth is I had spent my baby marketer days doing tons of things that could be packaged into a professional portfolio, and in all likelihood so are you. I just needed to dig deep and compile them to make my next interview the last one. It worked for me, and it will work for you too.
If you’re ready to level up your career, but you’re having a hard time compiling a portfolio that proves your qualifications, it’s time to ask yourself: what are you doing day-to-day that you can turn into a portfolio?
I’d love to help you translate your day-to-day tasks and early career wins into communications superpowers - share them in the comments and let’s workshop it!
